Freedom of the press is for everyone, not just those recognized by feds

By David McElroy · September 19, 2013

Do journalists have more rights than you do? Do you even know for sure what makes someone a journalist? And does the U.S. government have any business defining who’s a journalist and who’s not?

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has just inserted language into a bill that would limit who gets privileges as a journalist under the First Amendment. It would declare that those who get paid to report on the news are journalists, but those who don’t get paid for it aren’t journalists. She thinks that being a journalist is a special privilege (video). Under her rules, bloggers and “citizen journalists” aren’t journalists at all. This is wrong for journalism. It’s wrong for the law. But most importantly, it’s wrong for the average American.

How did we get to this point? Is Feinstein just an evil fascist, as Matt Drudge suggested about her on this issue? I don’t think so. She’s wrong, but it helps to understand what the underlying issues are.

In this country, we have freedom of the press because it’s mentioned in the First Amendment to the Constitution. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that we should have the right even without it being mentioned, because the government is given no power to taken that freedom away. I’m ignoring that because dealing with what the Constitution originally meant has nothing to do with how the law currently works here.) Because the First Amendment specifically says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…,” the media in this country have traditionally enjoyed a wide degree of freedom.

For a long time, journalists have argued that if they are required to reveal their sources of information — in court or in congressional hearings, for instance — it would have an impact on freedom of the press. If they could be forced to share such information, fewer people would give them information. So some states have enacted what are called “shield laws,” which shield journalists from having to reveal their sources. In this way, it gives media people a legal right that the rest of us don’t have.

Now journalists and some in Congress want a national shield law, which would protect reporters from having to reveal sources to courts or politicians. Here’s where it gets slippery.

Feinstein says that she’s willing to let “legitimate” journalists have this additional protection, but she’s not willing to go along with it if the same rights apply to writers, producers or bloggers who aren’t part of the traditional media. She thinks that if you’re not being paid for what you do, you shouldn’t have the same rights. And she’s successfully gotten that idea inserted into the Senate bill.

I’m opposed to the bill, but I see two layers of potential “badness” to it.

First, why should people working for corporate news operations have rights that aren’t also allowed for those who are solo operations or who are volunteers with activist groups? I can’t see any legal or moral justification for that. But the members of the journalist groups who want the shield law passed all work for big newspaper and television companies that pay them for their work, so this law would suit their purposes.

They have no reason to fight for the writers and producers who aren’t among their ranks. But why should the law treat those groups differently? If a person gets information about wrongdoing at his local government and writes an article about it on his blog, shouldn’t he be entitled to the same protection as the people from CNN and the Washington Post?

Second, I’m not sure that I can support shield laws in the first place. I like the idea of a journalist not having to reveal his sources — and I admire a reporter who’s willing to go to jail to protect his sources — but I don’t see why a paid journalist should have more rights than anyone else has.

Let’s say that you’re not a journalist or writer of any sort. But let’s say that you uncovered information about government wrongdoing and you decided that the public needed to see it. So you took steps to make sure that copies of the information got into the hands of other people in your area. Let’s say that the local government found out who released the information and took you to court — for theft of the information or whatever charge a prosecutor could cook up. Is it right that a paid journalist could refuse to testify and walk away, but you could be forced to testify or you’d be sent to jail?

Freedom of the press doesn’t just apply to those who are paid reporters. It also applies to bloggers and writers and independent producers of all sorts. But it also applies to everyone else. The freedom belongs to all of us.

If anybody can refuse to tell where he got information, we all should be able to. Otherwise, we’ve reached the point of de facto press licensing by government fiat.

I’m opposed to Feinstein’s plan to exclude bloggers, but I’m also against any law that suggests that the rest of us don’t have exactly the same rights that any reporter does.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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